180° Shift: Infrastructure on a Roll

Speaker

Krasnoff: Hello. So my name is Curren Krasnoff and I’m the founder and CEO of Cortex Composites and I’m here to show you something that you probably would not be expecting a young person to develop. I think these days we have an expectation that young people are doing applications and different apps, but it’s a little more rare to see something that is a material that replaces concrete or something that is not directly tech related. And I’m about to show you, we’ve only shown this at a handful of events and this essentially replaces concrete. If you need concrete up to six inches, which could be either shotcrete or concrete, so poured concrete that is either sprayed on, which is shotcrete or poured from a cement truck up to six inches. This replaces it with actually better performance and it costs 50 percent less than if you were installing it with a cement truck. So it’s really easy because all you have to do is you have to unroll it, if you can see, you unroll it and then you just hydrate it in place with water. So you’re at the construction site, you have these large rolls, you unroll them, you just spray it down with a hose and within 24 hours it hardens and you have your very rigid composite material. We actually—on average you save—it’s about 40 percent more cost-effective than the current best method of pouring concrete.

We currently as he said, we have over $20 million of orders before actually starting manufacturing. We have manufacturing set up for Q1 of 2015. We have distributors in the U.S. and internationally, and we’re currently working on some projects that are many times larger than the $20 million in preorders that we have. I want to also thank the Kairos Society, because half of the orders that we have to date have come through direct exposure and relationships that we’ve been provided through the Kairos Society. So big shout out to Kairos. And I also, just let me tell you, we have—this was developed at Arizona State University. We have 19 patents in the U.S. and internationally. We’re doing projects in Nigeria, in China, in Columbia, and we’re really trying to get this to be a new industry standard for concrete. You only need up to six inches, this is about as good as we think it gets. So thank you and thank you.

Related

These days we have an expectation that young people are doing applications and different apps, but it’s a little more rare to see something that is a material that replaces concrete or something that is not directly tech related.